I made no error. You did not understand, or at least did not express, the distinction between recording criticisms and taking the side of those criticisms. I clarified the discussion by stressing the difference between the two.
What I’m advocating has nothing at all do with “giving credence” to ID or anything else. The job of a general encyclopedia article on ID is simple. You record what ID says, you record its arguments, you record what its critics say, you record their arguments, and finally, you record the current state of opinion regarding ID. Record it. Then you shut up and stop writing. If you do more, if you go on to say (whether crudely and directly, or subtly and indirectly, by slanting the prose), “And by the way, I agree with the critics that ID sucks,” then you’re not an encyclopedia-writer, you’re an opinion columnist, a cultural critic, or whatever. Your job as the author of a general encyclopedia article is not to take a social, political, or cultural stand on anything; your job is to give all the information that people need to make up their minds about the question, not to do their thinking and their concluding for them. As one of the few people here (perhaps the only one?) to have published an article in a real encyclopedia (i.e., one run by and written by professional scholars whose names and qualifications are known, not hidden), I think I can say I’m giving a fair description of what a traditional encyclopedia does.
We had this discussion long ago. Probably you weren’t here yet. Joshua made a useful distinction between ID as a theory about design in nature and ID as a social/religious movement. When one talks about “ID” it’s necessary to make clear whether one is talking about it as a theory or a movement.
When I talk about ID, unless I specify otherwise, I’m talking about it as a theory, i.e., the theory that there is detectable design in nature, including all the related methodological discussions, empirical evidence, etc. I’m not talking about the activity of Discovery regarding school boards or the cause of bringing America back to a Christian nation, or anything of the sort. Now, ID as a theory has nothing to do with creationism. It does not presuppose the truth of the Bible, or of Christianity. It makes no use of Genesis. It couldn’t care less how old the earth is. It is not interested in in trying to find fragments of the Ark. It’s about looking at the information in cells and the apparently purposeful arrangement of parts in living things and the apparent fine-tuning of nature without which there could be no life, and it’s about trying to determine if these things point to a conclusion of intelligent design. Full stop.
I think that you are talking primarily about ID as a movement, and have almost no interest in it as a theory. So we are approaching things from the opposite direction. You probably like Wikipedia’s articles on ID because you think they tell the truth about the ID movement, but I hate them because they tell falsehoods about ID as a theory. As a theory, ID is not creationism, and it boils my blood to hear it stated that it is.
If Wikipedia would split its article into two, one on ID theory and one on the ID movement, and accurately characterize each, I would not have a problem. But because its editors are furious, for culture-war reasons, at ID as a movement, they can’t resist the temptation to misrepresent ID as a theory. Their rage to fight “creationism” (which for them is a social evil even more than a theoretical error) makes them unjust, causes them not to represent accurately what ID as a theory is claiming.
This is a garbled, oversimplified account. If you want a discussion from someone who knows the relevant texts in some detail (i.e., me – there’s no one here who has read as much ID literature as I have), see my long reply to Roy about the Pandas book quotation.
Without specifics, I can’t comment on this. I’ll just say I know hundreds of ID people, from the very top names down through the rank and file, and have been interacting with these people for about 15 years, often several times a day, and everyone is made to feel welcome. YECs, OECs and evolutionists all acknowledge each other as legitimate members of the ID fraternity. I’ve seen people start with Behe’s position and abandon it for OEC, and I’ve seen OECs abandon OEC for Behe’s position. In neither case was the person censured or blackballed by the ID community. And in the very rare cases where someone acts a little pushy, e.g., seeming to belittle YECs or seeming to attack those who accept common descent, I’ve seen prominent people step in and remind everyone listening that ID is a big tent and that what unites us is an interest in design detection. It’s the freest intellectual community I know – far freer than the community in most universities these days, where political correctness has created a massive list of things you’re not supposed to say or even think. Every day I converse with Christians, Jews, agnostics, Deists, – for a while, we even had an atheist ID proponent, believe it or not. (He’s no longer an atheist, but when he was, he was welcome in the intellectual community because he was open to the possibility of design in nature.) As an intellectual community, we can fairly boast that there is more diversity of opinion, both scientific and religious, in our group than in groups that are solely OEC, YEC, EC/TE, or atheist/materialist. Every imaginable variant on creation and evolution, except Dawkins/Coyne/Monod atheism, is found within our ranks. It’s the least doctrinaire collective I’ve ever been involved in. Much less doctrinaire than the collective that produces Wikipedia articles on origins.